Introduction of secure email facility

We are introducing email encryption. This will enable us to do more work by email but at the same time keep personal information safe. Until now, to send and receive personal or confidential information, we’ve had to use the post. We will continue to use normal email for emails that don’t need to be encrypted.

We will encrypt outgoing emails where they, and any attachment to them, contain information that needs to be protected. A simple password system will be used to open the encrypted email. We always recommend that personal information is sent to us securely too. There is a reply function within our encrypted emails that enables a response to us to be encrypted automatically. In due course, anyone who wants to send information to us but hasn’t yet had an encrypted email will be able to start the process by getting in touch with us.

A small group of our investigators is trying out the new way of working and we plan to be using it across the service by the end of March 2015. You’ll usually find out that it’s available on a case that you are involved with when we contact you using an encrypted email. If you are not sure, contact the investigator working on the case.

We see this as a significant improvement in how we communicate with people involved in complaints made to us and is another step in our long term aim of providing a more accessible, responsive service.